For many, these are uncertain times in medicine.

What will tomorrow hold for kidney patient care? Or next month, or next year? The shifts are radical. In some corners of nephrology, coworkers are disappearing right and left.

No one knows what the future holds, but human beings have lived on this planet for a very long time—and that past is always with us.

A thousand years ago, Norsemen first arrived at this land, possessed by the Native Americans for ages before that. This continent was wild and untamed. The Native Americans lived with nature, taking only what they needed, and leaving a smaller ecological footprint than white man could conceive.

As a result, the Eastern hardwood forests of the US had grown for millennia, undisturbed. For those who have not perused the few old photographs that were taken during timbering, it can be hard to visualize the sheer scale that these old trees achieved. They grew while generations of us lived and died. Empires were born, flourished, turned to dust, and the old forest still grew into the sky, locking their branches together, leaving only cool darkness and bare earth beneath them.

The dominant hardwood was the American Chestnut. It is estimated that, of all species of hardwoods, Chestnut trees accounted for 3 out of 4 of them. Furthermore, they bore nuts heavily, so they were the cornerstone of the Appalachian ecosystem.

Just over a hundred years ago, while we axed and sawed these old forests to the dirt, a blight was introduced, specific to the chestnut. Within a few years, the chestnut trees were functionally extinct. The entire ecosystem was reduced to rubble.

So what happened next? Did nature fall to dust, leaving the Appalachians a barren, uninhabitable wasteland? No, the oaks took over. Slowly, the forests began to grow back, with the oaks as the dominant hardwoods. The transition from chestnut to oak necessarily changed the ecosystem, but it survived—and thrived. We think of the forests around us as being mature, but they’re nowhere close. Many more empires of humans will come and go before they regain their fullness.

But they will regain it.

The history of our world is not one of failure. It is one of survival. Adaptation. This modern time is not the end of patient care, and certainly not the end of medicine. Just like the Appalachian forests that stand around us again, we will adapt, grow, and change. Humans have done it many times before.

Your corner of medicine may seem bleak, but do not give in to fear. Do not lose hope.

Because as the Appalachian forests testify, the entire world can grow again from a handful of acorns.

Thanks for reading,

                     Transonic Systems, Inc

                                    The Measure of Better Results